Musings and reflections on an ordinary life.

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Day 30

July 5, 2015 marks the thirtieth day since the accident that left me with a broken hip. Thirty days where I have fought hard to regain my strength and mobility so that one day I will be back cycling. The ice bag is a constant companion especially after standing for a long time or from doing my exercises as I try to keep any swelling to a minimum. I have come to that place where I recognize that it is going to take time to get back to some kind of normalcy, what that new normal will be only time will tell. It’s kind of like taking a journey where you not only don’t know where you are headed but you also don’t have a clear route, you just go based in part on faith. I am being a good boy, even when I get frustrated. I do my leg exercises, designed to both strengthen the leg and keep the muscles from atrophying. The PT’s who have visited keep me on track and I have also gotten into the habit of doing these a couple of times a day. Somehow, it gives me the sense that I am making progress. That’s something else that is interesting, this progress thing. Sure, I am now able to get about on a cane rather than crutches and other people see my determination and ability to move around, but from the inside, progress is a slow moving machine. Feeling my muscles contracting and moving while I try to rest, feeling that deep ache and then getting paranoid about those titanium rods. Are they staying in place? Would hate for them to kind of shift in some no so good way.

There is also that feeling stuck thing. I look out my window and see folks jogging, walking, riding their bikes and I sit there just wanting to get out. Last night, watching fireworks on the television is no substitute for seeing them live, then again by the time they were shown I was well into another fitful nights sleep. Then, I remembered that today, 100 years ago, July 5, 1915 my Great-Uncle James Travis boarded a troop transport that would ultimately take him and many others to battlefields of Gallipoli. I can only imagine what he may have been thinking, he and so many other men from Manchester, going off to fight for King and Country. Kitchener’s army, all volunteers, all ready to face the enemy in a war that some had predicted would end by Christmas of 1914, but instead had settled into a war of attrition along miles and miles of trenches.

Life is a series of waiting’s, we always seem to be waiting for something. When I was in the Army, it was “hurry up and wait,” run here and there only to watch the time tick away all the while wondering why.